NIGERIA Invest in 2012-13 - Newsdesk Media

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SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE
Obstetrics, paediatric medicine
and trauma care are the services
most often sought by patients
The Nigerian healthcare sector remains fragmented,
leaving it ripe for investment with an increasingly wealthy
middle class demanding a higher quality of care
“If you set up the hospital to focus on making it a
centre of excellence for those types of cases, you scale up
quite quickly. If you get clever and start investing in
technology like MRI scans or CAT scans or endoscopic type
procedures, I think that initially you would struggle to get a
return on that and get to scale. It’s quite a fine balance.
You need to start where you service the demand from the
community, which in general is just emergencies.”
While there remain constraints on the number of doctors
and other medical professionals on the continent, the presence
of international staff – from Eastern Europe, Latin America and
India, coupled with a growing cohort of returnees from the
diaspora – means that there is talent available, Botha said.
“We find that in countries like Nigeria and Ghana
you tend to come across more educated medical staff,
INvEST IN NIGERIA 2012-13
and people who have been working abroad want to return
from the US or the UK,” he explained. “The quality is much
better in West Africa.”
The return on investment, he said, should be firmly
in double figures: “The important thing is not to go and
establish a 200-bed hospital there, because you’re going
to struggle. But if you’re smart and if you build a 50-bed
hospital and you invest only in what the market is demanding
at the present time, then you can put the process in place to
get the productivity and efficiency, you can get a 20 per cent
margin. I’m pretty confident of that.”
Zain Latif, managing director of Duet Private Equity and
principal at TLG Capital, has invested in the continent’s
healthcare sector for several years, and recently helped to
close an investment in Nigeria’s medical insurance industry.